When the arsonist had first come to she'd seemed alright. "Hey," Dell had said to her when she finally stirred on the couch, putting aside his book ("Handbook of Peizoelectric Crystals", a very interesting military treatise indeed).

She didn't say much for the first few minutes. Then she kind of looked at him, pupil still blown out. It took him a few seconds to realize she was looking through him, instead, and started steeling himself for another crazed outburst.

It didn't come, though. Instead she sort of just pulled herself to her feet and looked around, very reverently, like she'd never seen the place before. Dell chewed his lip. "Campfire?"

If she heard him, he never found out. What she did do was turn to his couch, make a fascinated sound, and started stacking the cushions on top of each other.

It escalated quickly.

Dell watched, dumbfounded, as she draped the thick quilt he'd put over her over the desk lamp; as she threw open the blinds and tied bows in their drawstrings; as she turned every book on his shelves upside down, talking quietly to herself in a way he couldn't understand.

Then she flipped the end table, letting the framed pictures and pencils and things clatter to the ground. He kept watching as she sat down in front of it, running her hands along it. Then without much obvious effort, she snapped half of one of the legs off.

"Hey!" he hollered, getting to his feet. She looked at him with about as much regard as she might give a gnat, and went back to ignoring him entirely.

Not knowing what else to do, Dell went to the kitchen and made himself a cup of coffee. The snapping noises continued unabated. It had stopped by the time he looked in again a few minutes later. Now the arsonist was just sitting there, staring blankly at the half-mauled end table and the neat piles of wood she had apparently been making.

"You still crazy?" he said. Her head lifted, dreamlike, and she looked up at him. A moment later, she extended her hand to offer him a piece of wooden leg. Not daring to refuse, he took it. The arsonist went back to meticulously breaking his furniture apart.

So now he was sitting at the kitchen table, coffee in one hand and wood in the other, and wondering what on earth to do next. It had been hours since her exposure to the dispenser. Maybe this had its roots in something deeper.

Dell took a sip of his coffee and wondered who Tobias had been.

It wasn't much later that the arsonist wandered into the room. In the light her filthy and bloodstained clothes only exaggerated her sorry condition; the front of her sweatshirt was more holes than fabric. For a few seconds she swayed on her heels, fidgeting with the bloody gauze that was still wrapped around her skull. She stopped as her eye settled on him, and he noted that her pupil seemed back to normal. "…The living room's messed up."

Dell nodded.

"The couch cushions are—they kind of looked like Klondike bars. Big ones. That's wood," she interrupted herself, now looking at the shrapnel in his hand. He nodded again. The arsonist looked off somewhere else. "Oh."

"What'd you think it was?"

"…Chocolate."

"Huh," said Dell. "Well. I appreciate the sentiment."

She said nothing to that. She had noticed her clothes, finally, holding the torn sweatshirt away from her chest to stare at it. "That's … is that blood?" She glanced up at him. "This is blood, this is all blood."

"It would appear to be blood, yes."

"What in the mother of fuck happened?"

"You remember anything at all 'bout last night?" He motioned her over to sit at the table.

She hung by the doorway. "Not really."

"Found you in my garage last night," he started, and waited to see her reaction. If her face changed, he couldn't tell. "Weren't in too good shape. This ringing a bell?" She only shrugged. "Well. You were makin' friends with my sentry."

Her eye narrowed in what he imagined was confusion, head tilting by degrees. "Sentry?"

"Sentry, turret. Automatic gun. I told you not to go in there," he said, "though, given the fact that back door's got a biometric lock on it I don't think it was you opened it."

"A what?"

"Bi-o-met-tric. S'Aussie technology. Only way that door opens is it gets my fingerprint. An' I sure weren't the one opened it."

For a long few seconds she watched him, then dragged her gaze away. Soon she pushed off from the doorway and joined him at the table. Dell waited, patient, as she fiddled with the edges of her hole-riddled sweatshirt.

"I was outside," she said at last, slowly and like she wasn't quite sure herself, "and the lights in the garage went on. And the back door was open. So I went in, and I …" Her words trailed off, and he could see her brow furrow. "You were there. But you didn't have that bruise." (Dell suppressed a wince at the reminder. She'd clocked him good, it still hurt.) "So I hit you—him—and he turned into, into this … into someone else. The masked man."

That sounded right. Sounded right her first reaction would be to start swinging, too. Had to give her instincts credit, at least. He was just about to open his mouth again when she cut him off. "He said he was your coworker. Earlier, I mean."

"Wait, earlier?"

"After I fell. I was on the couch. He—he gave me cigarettes."

Dell could feel his temples starting to throb. Sneaky bastard had snuck into his house while he was in the garage. He sighed, and said, "You still got those?"

He could see her eye screw up in doubt, but she reached into her jacket pocket. With some difficulty, she extracted something that once upon a time had probably been a cigarette; now it was largely a collection of exploded paper and tobacco. But there was just enough there to calm him, a little: it matched the very distinct brand his teammate exclusively smoked. The enemy he suspected had not been in his house.

"Then he, he disappeared. He disappeared."

"Yeah," Dell said, frustrated with everything, "he'll do that."

It took him a second to notice the arsonist was glaring at him, that her eye was boring into him. "'He'll do that'?" she said. He blinked at her, and she went tense, hunched, angry. "You're—you're goddamn telling me you're friends with some, some freak of nature that can turn invisible. I thought I was losing my fucking mind and you're just oh, he'll do that! Where the fuck do you work that you've got magical disappearing coworkers?"

Dell could feel his long temper coming to an end, egged on by soreness and sleeplessness. "Now you just calm down," he said, more sharply than he had intended. "It ain't magic, it's technology. Very advanced technology that would like as not take me the better part of a week to explain to you."

"And him turning into a near-perfect copy of you is technology too, huh?"

"Yes."

"Bullshit."

Dell snorted. "The fact my sentry shot you six ways to Sunday and you're still breathin' sure ain't bullshit. Look, it's right there on your damn shirt."

Silence. The arsonist looked confused, just for an instant, and then her gaze dropped back down to her own body. Stained fabric and bullet holes. The dawning realization was plain even beneath the mask. "I … wait, but—he, he fucking stabbed me, I didn't—" Then she was scrambling to feel her side, to find whatever wound the encounter had left her with. From where he sat, Dell could see her wildly investigating the space below her ribs. "He. He stabbed me, I swear to God, he did, there's blood—and your thing went off on me—" Now she was feeling herself out for damage, bullet holes, any kind of wound. All she found were the tears in the fabric of her clothing. Dell could practically feel the air tighten as she wound herself up. "I don't—don't touch me!" she snarled when he lifted his hand, as if that could stop her.

"Sorry," he said irritably, and dropped his arm. "But if you'll calm down for two seconds I—"

"I'm insane," she announced, stumbling to her feet. "Goddamn loony, my God, haha, hahahahaha, shit, I'm making up guys that turn invisible and guns that rip you up without any holes, I'm, I'm, God, dear God just shoot me now. I can't do this."

"Now look here—"

"Shut up, just shut up—"

"No," Dell said, "look here." He'd picked up the shredded wood as he said it, leaning back in his chair. The arsonist went quiet, but only just, a terse and vibrating silence. She turned her whole body toward him, and was in the middle of snarling something else when he acted. He presented both wood and his free hand, and then very calmly ripped a bloody swath into his palm with the former.

That shut her up. "What," she said.

Dell stood, making for the door. "You ain't crazy." (That was debatable. But mentioning it wouldn't help things.) "I'll explain what I can, but you've got to calm down."

His ploy had worked, at least: she followed him relatively quietly back to the garage. That at least was worth the sting of his skinned hand. As he disarmed the door, she said, "I don't understand anything about you."

"Wouldn't be the first time I've heard that."

The blood on the cement ground had turned into a gaping dark stain. Beside it still sat the dispenser, cold and silent. "Now," Dell said, leaning over to flip it on, "you got stabbed, right?" No answer. "An' shot fulla holes."

She stopped fingering the rips in her clothing. "I guess."

He shook his head. "There's no 'I guess' about it. Who else you think that puddle belongs to? Ain't mine." Lowering his hand to within range of the humming dispenser, he continued. "So last night my sentry alarm goes off. I get up and go see what's the trouble and then I find I've got a shot-up arsonist bleedin' out in my garage. Didn't see anythin' like a stab wound, but right then you were more holes than not."

"Then why the fuck am I alive?"

"Well, for one you picked a fine spot to get yourself killed," Dell said. "If I'd had to bring the dispenser all the way from here to the fields or like, I doubt I woulda got there in time."

"Dispenser?"

He rapped his knuckles against the box, breaking out into a self-satisfied smile as the blue light of the machine reached up to wrap around his injured hand. "Dispense-O-Matic 9000. Well, this'n's an 7500. Ah, I won't get into specifics. But this little beauty here, she's a regular hospital all on her own."

The arsonist looked like she had something to say, and forgot it instantly once she saw the machine go to work. The light crept over the wound for a few seconds, and then it began to close. New skin replaced the raw, red scratches, steady and intent, and even the traces of blood vanished quickly after. Dell raised up his hand and turned it over: it was like it had never been harmed at all. "Just like that."

When he looked at his guest again, she'd hunched into herself, staring pensively at the dispenser. It took her a long while to find what she wanted to say. Then: "Where did you get that?"

"That I can't tell you."

"How does it work?"

"Can't tell you that either."

She gave him a withering look. "So here you are, out in the middle of goddamn Nowhere, Texas, and you've got this, what, this magic box, and a big gun that shoots people on its own—and you hang out with people that turn invisible and shapeshift. That's what you're telling me."

Dell scratched his nose, turning off the machine. "About that, yes."

"Who are you?" she demanded as he hefted the dispenser up and began taking it back to its spot by the sentry. "Why the hell—"

She stopped short, and it took Dell a moment to see why. It was apparent immediately—she'd noticed the sentry. (He had to admit it was funny seeing her going stock-still like that, midstep.) "It's off, don't worry."

Slowly, she relaxed, though the suspicious look in her eye went nowhere. Instead she fixed her gaze upon the dispenser as he set it back down. "…It heals anything?"

"Just about. Nothin' already healed up, scars'n so, but she's a real miracle of science. You were more or less on the edge when I found you, and here you are now."

"Oh," she said, and nothing more as she watched him draw the tarp back over it. She turned away as he checked over both it and the sentry for any tampering (couldn't be too sure). He finished up and looked around just in time to see her rip something down from high on a shelf—

The light in her voice was not something he had ever heard from her before. "Shark!"

Oh, God save them both.